Across the Arab world, people living under the thumb of repressive leaders are rising up against the rulers who once seemed omnipotent.

They are using the Internet to network and spread the word. They are watching themselves on satellite television. They are drawing strength from the hyperactive energy of the frustrated young people dismissed and discarded by their governments.

It is a contagious spirit.

“I lost all the fear when I saw people killed by cops during the demonstrations,” said Ahmad Chibel, a 30-year-old technology consultant who took part in the protests that overthrew Tunisian strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

They are not quite sure what they want. But from North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, they know they want change. And their wrath and their courage are creating a new form of Arab unity.

“It’s like a transition moment in the Arab world,” said Mohammed Abu Rumman, a political researcher at the University of Jordan, in Amman, where protests erupted Friday. “It’s the influence of the Tunisian domino, and it will not stop. It will go to other Arab states.”

The uprisings are having a ricochet effect across the Arab world. People are watching the events unfolding on television and Facebook and identifying with the people in the streets. “I was with my friends on Facebook, and we encouraged each other,” said Dali ben Salem, a 25-year-old intern at a pharmacy in Tunis, the Tunisian capital. “The solidarity helped me to face the fear.”

And whether or not Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak manages to survive what one analyst called a political “tsunami” that is enveloping the Arab world, things will never return to normal, analysts said.

“It’s political challenge to autocratic systems that have degraded and dehumanized people and humiliated them to the point where they just can’t take it anymore, and they finally started to erupt,” said Rami Khouri, a commentator and analyst affiliated with the American University of Beirut. “That’s combined with intense social and economic pressures and disparities which are accentuated by the lavish lifestyles of the rich who made their money by being close to the regime.”

Opposition activists, human rights advocates and international bodies such as the United Nations have for years warned that the continued social and political stagnation in the Arab world would create the conditions for a social explosion. Prodded by the United States and the European Union, some of the regimes have made halfhearted efforts at reform.

But many consider it all too little too late. They are already comparing 2011 to 1989, the year authoritarian regimes of the former Soviet Union began to collapse. The wall has come down. Like the youths who braved the truncheons of the Stasi henchmen in Dresden and Leipzig more than 20 years ago, they are making a stand with generational repercussions.

“It’s a revolution, a democratic revolution that we were supposed to have experienced 20 years ago,” said Abdullah Faqih, a political scientist in Sana, the capital of Yemen, where large and mostly peaceful protests have broken out against the regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Most see in the uprisings something more than just worries about material gain. There’s the perception of injustice and mistreatment. “It isn’t just about the economy,” said Charles Dunbar, a former U.S. diplomat to the Middle East. “It’s just general anger.”

Analysts say the regimes have risked it all by ignoring the warning cries of their reformers, who have long beseeched them to change their ways before it was too late.